Net Power

Energy shortages, loadshedding, cost of energy and climate change. Each is a difficult problem to solve on its own, let alone trying to make trade offs for solutions that address all.

I recently came across a company called Net Power and I think that they have technology that could potentially change the game. The current process of using natural gas for energy is to mix air with the gas prior to combustion. This results in large volumes of CO2 being released, as well as some other gasses, in a mixture. Companies have long tried to separate the CO2 from this mixture in order to “capture and sequester” it, however it has proven to be quite difficult. The Inflation Reduction Act has further incentivised this with a 70% increase in tax credits, prompting companies to keep trying.

Enter Net Power. Instead of trying to separate the CO2 at the end of the process, they started separating the air at the start of the process and then feeding purified oxygen into the combustion process. This is a relatively easy process that has been around on a large scale for quite some time. By changing the input from “air” to purified oxygen the waste product is no longer a difficult to separate CO2 mixture, but rather an easy to separate mixture of CO2 and water.

They can therefore produce carbon free baseload power, while profiting from selling the industrial gas byproducts in step 1 as well as the tax credits from the carbon capture and sequestration in step 6. All this is before considering other use cases for piped CO2, such as enhanced oil recovery.

This excited me because it dealt with both the E and the S of ESG, which is notoriously difficult to balance together:
E- reduced carbon and nitrogen emissions
S- potentially cheaper energy as tax credits and sales of by products can be used to lower prices